


Run Like The Light

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [9]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, F/F, F/M, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 22:54:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6726655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Not her," Ghost says. "She's not for you. I won't let you -"</p><p>"It's not your choice," Boss says, calm, like summer thunder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run Like The Light

**_One_ **

Something is coming.

It's the deer that tip her off. On Manor's southern border, the deer herds are thinning out or moving north, although there's plenty of food there for them. But there's no large settlements there, no gangs, nothing in the reports that indicate people.

When Siti starts digging, she finds things that worry her. Quiet reports where there should be noise. A merchant and his entire train missing-presumed bandits that were never found. Empty houses with warm hearths and tended fields.

The maps are old. They need new ones.

Siti uses rusty red pins to mark her worry.

**_Two_ **

Spring warms, and no one seems to think it's weird that Mace is out on the grass next to the big house every evening, muttering over wires, sat back to back with Ghost, and Ghost is stroking Siti's hair because Siti is sprawled out next to them, nose deep in a book.

No one ever looks twice, unless it's to smile.

Back home, where her mother is, where her family is, people would stare. People would judge. It's warmer there, and wetter, but Siti can maybe take the horrors of the cold if it means this. If it means them.

**_Three_ **

She gathers up the courage to ask the radio team to send out questions. She does it in secret, leaving a written message on the desk when no one's there. A full report returns within a week, handed to her a boy with a bounce in his step.

She needed to know if anything particularly strange appeared, in the south.

The report gives her accounts of grass dolls, tied to fences and on poles by roadsides, strange smells on the air, campfires quickly abandoned, two dead scouts with circles carved into their skin.

Siti places her pins, and she worries.

**_Four_ **

There are things her people did not do.

They didn't keep horses, ponies, or donkeys. They were their own pack animals, because they thought only people were reliable. They herded cattle, sheep. They had only feral cats, wild, angry creatures. Manor's many cats are friendly and don't scratch. It surprises Siti still. She hesitates before she pets them, and thinks they judge her for it. They had dogs, too, big fine-furred dogs with echoing barks to guard the herds.

She finds a report that mentions finding a dead cat, a hung cat.

There are things her people did not do.

**_Five_ **

There were other people, who lived nearby, and liked her people because their beliefs were a little alike. Father never liked them. They roamed erratically, and made a habit of killing people who offended them. They thought cats were demons, that horses had to be broken, that anyone who spoke up against them was possessed by monsters.

It was a small kindness that they did not believe in empires.

Siti's people remember, a history poured into their bones from birth, the follies of old empires. They remember that someone must always pay the price.

There are things these people do.

**_Six_ **

Ghost takes her out, drags her out of bed at dawn and tugs her along through the wild, knotted maze that is the land outside Manor. Blossom trees are losing their petals in gusts of icy cold wind, and Siti's grown used to Manor's easy luxuries, water to wash in, beds to sleep in. She doesn't see what Ghost does in the hill and mud and cold.

She bears it. It makes Ghost glow from the inside, to show her, to explain, to point out the little things. She likes all the flowers, but she has never really liked camping.

**_Seven_ **

Siti cannot always put her words in the right places. This has always been. When she is tired, joyful, very angry. When she is warm and safe and utterly relaxed.

Her father tried to teach her how to form words, to write poetry. He involved her in the family's trade to teach her languages, to make sure she had words for everything. He died before he gave up.

The travellers told her such stories.

He was kinder than her mother, but her mother was never cruel.

There is not enough poetry in her to describe how Mace uses his hands.

**_Eight_ **

Alone, one night, Siti stares at the maps in lantern light and considers.

It could be nothing. Travellers. She came far, far north of home, with - settled near her cliff-town nearly two years after leaving home. This land is not a good place for her people, or any like them. It chills. It has cold, alien snow. The dogs would not survive.

She's seeing something because she wants to see it. A part of her still calls it home, wants to go back to her family and start her life again. That's all it is. That's all it can be.

**_Nine_ **

Ghost has no children.

Siti asks, once.

Ghost hesitates before she says, "I'm worried there's something wrong in my family. An angry monster. It might have just been the End, so many were broken by it, but I'm not sure."

Siti leans her head against Ghost's legs and says nothing.

"That's why I drink the tea," Ghost says. "There's plenty of children around, anyway. We're not going to run out any time soon."

Siti waits.

Ghost says, after a while, "Can I tell you a story? It's about a little girl."

Secure, safe, Ghost's hand stroking her braids, Siti listens.

**_Ten_ **

Boss is there one day, when Siti's peering through paper and putting in pins. She's there with One, and Leander, and a couple others she doesn't recognise.

She tries to tell them that she isn't certain.

Boss says nothing. Everyone else does. Siti doesn't quite keep up and she's lost, hands moving too fast, signs blurring into each other, a wave of gestures, when Boss says, "What would you do?"

Siti stops. She remembers to breathe. She queries.

"Knowing what you think you know," Boss says, "What would you do?"

Siti doesn't hesitate, not now. She tilts her head, thinking.

**_Eleven_ **

Her earliest memory is the shadow dancing.

There was a shallow lake inside a cliff-sided valley, full of greenery her eyes burned to see, In the cliffs were caves carved out by an older, lost people. They set fires in front of the caves and danced between fire and cave mouth, throwing their shadows into the dark depths.

She watched them dance, a silk-wrapped toddling child, not understanding when her mother told her they were dancing with the monsters that haunted the caves, to soothe their spirits.

She sees now, in her memory, that the caves had metal, grey walls.

**_Twelve_ **

Siti tells Boss who these people are, in that room, under those eyes. She tells Boss what they do. She tells Boss to kill them.

Boss doesn't blink, doesn't look surprised. She nods. She says, "What else have you seen?"

Siti tries to explain, and the people before her are patient whilst she does. There are patterns, and things that break the patterns, and maybe-dangers and maybe-friends, and the way the weather shifts in the same way every few years. There are chances, opportunities, her father might once have leapt to try.

"What else?" Boss says again, and again, pushing.

**_Thirteen_ **

Leander says, when there are only three of them in the room, "She's our most vulnerable, and you're making her your spymaster. You're putting her in danger."

"Manor's spymaster," Boss says, not looking at anyone. "And I haven't made her anything."

"She's small," he says. "Weaker. Prone to fevers and colds. She can't shout an alarm."

These things are true. They don't hurt.

"She'll be the most loved," Boss says. "The most protected. There are other ways to raise alarm." She walks out.

Leander says, "Be careful of her." He seems old. Haunted. "She's not a good person."

Siti nods.

**_Fourteen_ **

In the sheltering, shallow woods on the edge of Manor is a target area.

Boss takes Siti there, alone. She holds up a weapon of wood and metal and says, "This is a crossbow." She demonstrates how to prepare it, arm it, fire it, twice over and then she hands it to Siti.

It fits in Siti's hands easily. It's lighter than she expects.

Ghost says, "No."

Ghost was not invited here.

Boss turns, storms in her step.

"Not her," Ghost says. "She's not for you. I won't _let_ you -"

"It's not your choice," Boss says, calm, like summer thunder.

**_Fifteen_ **

Siti lets them argue.

She copies Boss' motions, her hands fumbling. Looks down the sight. Fires.

Blinks, confused. The bolt went deeper than she thought. Is she too close?

There is quiet behind her. Siti turns.

Boss says, soft, barbed, "You can't reshape a thing fully grown," and Ghost flinches, child-like. "I can't make her something she isn't. Live with it. Next time -"

"There won't be a next time," Ghost says and it is not, quite, a threat.

Boss' lips quirk up, an old woman amused.

"Your hold is wrong," Ghost says to Siti, and she helps her corrects it.

**_Sixteen_ **

Boss says they'll send an expedition, One drums up some two dozen volunteers, and Leander puts the resources together.

This is the way Manor seems to work. Collaboration on command.

Someone decides that Siti must go. She can't tell who.

Siti, but not Ghost.

Ghost pressed her lips together tight and says nothing.

Mace is the one that convinces Siti to wear the armour she's offered, padded leather, clunky. He whispers his reason into her ears at night and she cannot resist that, the world given form and strength, every action made understandable, made fair and right.

It's completely unfair.

**_Seventeen_ **

She knows very well what spies are. Manor has none. They have scouts, and traders, and people who travel because they crave it, and people who handle traders and travellers who aren't of Manor, and they collect rumours and stories.

But they have reports, information condensed into word and sentences, and they have maps. They have files in old, worn cardboard about secret places, built before the End, full of deep, dark, horrible things.

All the location pages are missing. It takes her two weeks to find them, hidden in the very back of the most buried box of papers.

**_Eighteen_ **

Ghost is gone, out, the morning the convoy of twenty six and herself leaves Manor. Mace kisses her goodbye, but the absence remains.

Siti perches on a cart with her crossbow on her back and a beautiful mottled green-brown cape over her shoulders, to drive off early spring chill. Shedoesn't look as Manor's walls fade into the distance.

The troop travel quiet when there's no one in sight, keeping in each other's view and signing rather than speaking. It's a shortened form of her signs, choppier, ruder. It's not hard to learn, and fun to startle them the first time.

**_Nineteen_ **

Siti misses her bed.

Siti misses clean water and hot food and being left on her own, she misses the radio crackle and the papers, honey-dipped bread and sunlight through shutters and children playing and books.

She didn't know she could love a place so.

She misses, most of all, in three weeks of donkey-pulled cart rides going south and east, being treated like she knows what she's doing. Even having every sneeze worried over by someone was better than this, than never lifting a finger, being coddled and cared for, being smothered by concern.

She is broken, not breaking.

**_Twenty_ **

They travel quiet until they reach the dishevelled but whole, sound shape of a rusting building. The letters of the sign are all tumbled to the ground, but whilst everyone sets up camp inside the foyer with its tall ceiling, Siti drags them together.

Clinic, she reads.

In the rooms there are cabinets with empty bottles in them that say things she can't at all comprehend, and some that still have hard coloured lumps in them. She asks, but someone tells her they're poison. She collects them into a handful of bottles and shakes them, just to hear them rattle.

**_Twenty One_ **

The scouts head out. Siti borrows a crowbar to take apart a giant machine and finds wires inside, so many of them. Mace is always needing wire, so she rescues them.

The leader, Hound - "But I answer to 'hey, you'," he says when they first meet - says, "That's a good idea," when he sees her armful, and sets people to scavenging. The company makes her jitter. She escapes to quieter parts of the clinic.

There is a small one, a photograph, next to a bed with a white-wrapped body shape. Two people, in a green space, smiling. Siti takes it.

**_Twenty Two_ **

She takes to the roof on the third night, so she sees the smoke in the distance. South. Far off. Two plumes that dance and blur in the wind.

When the scouts return the next day, Siti isn't surprised to hear they found a camp over there. A hundred people, perhaps, with ponies, people with heads covered in cloth and cold feet in sandals.

The camp's empty the next afternoon, only dry ground and warm ashes.

"Split up," Hound says. "We can handle them if they stay that way." But he can see the trails lead east and west, too.

**_Twenty Three_ **

For several hours, to his mounting annoyance, she tries to teach Hound a sentence of her language. It's difficult. If she could speak it, he could copy her, but instead she must explain the sounds with only her hands. In the end he manages a coherent, badly pronounced, line, and she lets it be.

She sits on the roof and worries.

The scouts can't find anyone, not even smoke, or the whinny of a single animal, and that is how the week passes. Quiet. Tense.

Siti doesn't go outside. She feels watched, out there. Like cold, hard, angry eyes watch.

**_Twenty Four_ **

Shouting breaks silence, wakes everyone up. The doors are guarded but Siti, scrambling to her feet in the mess of people rushing to their barricades of old furniture, feels only fear.

These people attack in the night. This is a warning.

Hound calls out for her and she comes, but not happily.

It is not a hundred standing in front of the old clinic. It is twenty, each in horribly familiar brown silks except for one, in red, with the mask of a holy man, and the very foremost, with his white sash.

Almost alone, in the doorway, Siti shivers.

**_Twenty Five_ **

Hound says to the men, "This is Manor's land. What are you doing here?"

The man with the white sash says, "We claim this land for ourselves. Begone from this cursed hall."

They say it in different languages. There's a long moment as both of them realise the problem.

Siti looks between them and sighs, soft breath on cool air. She tugs at Hound's sleeve and translates for him. She tells him to speak the sentence.

In her people's tongue, somehow even more mangled than before, Hound says, "The land burns but still you do not see."

The others freeze.

**_Twenty Six_ **

A girl properly wrapped in silks, marked out as protected, untouchable, could attend to any man's campfire and listen to stories.

There is a story of the End.

A prophet came to the people before the End and told them what was coming. They cast him out, and still, he dogged their paths and told them how to survive the fires. When the End came, he stood before them and he said, "The land burns but still you do not see."

The prophet died before Siti was born. He'd been old even then. But the story became stronger than him.

**_Twenty Seven_ **

Muttering.

Siti cannot speak, but she takes off her cape and gives it to Hound. She musters a proper bow, hands laced together behind her back, deep and held for a dozen heartbeats, and straightens. This is respect.

There are other gestures she could make.

She takes up a stick and draws, sharp, staccato, a sentence in the right script on the ground: _this land is already claimed_.

The man with the white sash leans forward. "It is ours now," he says.

She translates for Hound.

"What do you think?" he says, and she feels the weight of his hope.

**_Twenty Eight_ **

The discussion takes most of the day.

The man with the white sash is arrogant, proud. He will take everything he can, she feels, and has little respect for a small woman dressed in foreign clothes.

Hound has no real authority, when it comes to making bargains over Manor's border. Neither does Siti. They can only discuss where the border of Manor's land is, and these people's claimed lands, and agree not to attack each other tonight.

The second day of talking doesn't get much further. The man with the white sash insults every time he speaks, with his tone.

**_Twenty Nine_ **

On day three, the man with the white sash says only, "Get off our lands by sunset or we will kill you."

Hound says, "No," and his tense body tells the rest.

The man with the white sash tells her, "You do not belong with these people, little one. Come with us. We will see you safely home."

She hesitates, and he leaves. She thinks.

Hound says to her, "What did he say?"

She turns to him, and she hands him her crossbow, and she presses a finger to his lips and asks him to travel north. To trust her.

 


End file.
